


Sharp As You Are

by nekare



Category: The Borgias
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-01
Updated: 2011-05-01
Packaged: 2017-10-18 20:58:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekare/pseuds/nekare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucrezia has been married for three months and twenty one days when she decides to put an end to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sharp As You Are

**Author's Note:**

> I figure that if the rest of the Borgia family is full of crazy murderous people, Lucrezia should be in it too! Especially in present circumstances. THUS, this. Does that mean that this is sort of AU RLF, then? PROBABLY. Betaed by the lovely Sablier_bloque! Just like the show, this doesn’t even pretend to be historically correct, by which I mean, this is totally me making stuff up. I was stubborn and refused to look up what had really happen while I was writing so I wouldn’t know how wrong I’d gotten it. (hint: I got it really wrong.)

Long before anything changed, before her father wore white and her brother red, Lucrezia would dance, humming to make her own music. She would imagine herself at grand parties, elegant banquets and even her own wedding, picturing herself blushing at the attention but glad for it, and everyone around her would be graceful and kind, smiling at her while candles make everything glow golden under the dusk.

After all, she was young, she was bright, she was the future pope’s daughter, and some day she would marry someone beautiful and lovely, even a prince, maybe, and they would live happily ever after. That is what everyone told her, and she believed them, for it would be a sad world if fairy tales weren’t real.

Cesare caught her once, while she practiced a galliard, inventing half the steps as she went because it’s more entertaining like that. He was behind her, so she didn’t see him before he lifted her up and twirled her around, arms around her middle. She let out a shriek that turned into laughter, and she could feel him laugh against her back as well.

“Bored, Lucrezia? he said, his breath tickling her neck.

“Not now!” she gasped in laughter, a bit dizzy but not minding. When he finally put her back down, she immediately pressed her palm to his, moving until he finally smiled and shook his head, and began dancing with her. They fell in step of a lavolta, so intimate, but so fitting. Lavoltas are usually only danced by couples, and it makes her want to blush, just a bit.

It was sundown, and everything was painted in light pinks and yellows. Her brother looked softer like this, in a way that he hadn’t looked since their father made him take the cloth despite his wishes. “Something on your mind, my love?” he asked, while he spun her around too fast for this style of dance.

She’s was still humming along to their dancing, but she stopped to say, “Will you still love me after I marry, Cesare?”

He smiled at her, confused. “What kind of question is that? Of course I will.” He pulled her closer, touching his finger to her nose, and she giggled.

“I’m just afraid of losing you, is all.” Everyone has spent her whole life discussing her future marriage as a most joyous thing, that it would be just like in stories, but it wasn’t until she was seven that she finally understood that the groom in her childhood fantasies wasn’t going to be Cesare, and a life where he’s not part of it sounds so very grim.

“Don’t be silly, Lucrezia. I will always be there for you.”

She believed him, because Cesare would not lie to her. They danced until the sun went down, and they could only see each other hazily, as if in a dream.

Once she’s married, she remembers this, and so many other moments, and wishes she could go back to being the child she was.

 

\----

 

Paolo is sweet and soft under her hands, all tenderness in a way that disarms her after her husband’s nightly visits, but she can’t help but see Cesare in her mind every time Paolo holds her hand, every time he kisses her neck oh so softly.

She’s not surprised, or at least not exactly. Cesare has always been the world to her, beginning and end (may her father forgive her blasphemy), the one who was there for her first steps and that played with her when everyone else was busy. He was the one she imagined marrying when she was little, covered in her mother’s silks and dancing alone in empty hallways.

She is, however, surprised by the intensity of it. She’d always wondered how it would feel to be one of the many girls he’s hidden in his rooms over the years. To know what it would be like to see him, to touch him, but always in an abstract kind of way, the same way she’d wonder what would kissing someone feel like, to have someone so close you can breathe them in.

Now she knows what it’s like to be touched, and she hates it, hates her husband at nights, feels like dying and like killing him before letting him touch her again. Then daylight comes, and she loves it with Paolo, loves the sweetness and the mutual give and take, and decides that with Cesare, it would be like this.

Cesare would never hurt her, after all.

 

\----

 

After her husband breaks his leg, he gets worse. He is bitter now, drinking far too much and taking it out on her, on the servants and even the animals, until everyone in the house walks gravely in silence, keeping their heads down to avoid the attention for the things they will invariably have done wrong in their lord’s eyes.

They are a house of ghosts, pale and quiet, with too many bruises to hide between all of them.

Lucrezia lies to herself. She half convinces herself that it will be all right, if only for the stolen moments in the stables, for the half laughs with Francesca, the extra sweets that the cooks slip her and her mother’s long letters that have so much writing in them yet say so little about what is happening in Rome, what Cesare is doing.

His own letters are short, almost to the point. He misses her, but there is a new lady in his sight, and for the first time in her life, after growing up so vastly loved, she feels alone.

Her husband nearly beats a young boy to death one day, after he drops the lord’s breakfast on his lap by mistake, and it is just too much.

Lucrezia has been married for three months and twenty one days when she decides to put an end to it.

 

\----

 

Telling Cesare is both harder and easier than she thought. They haven’t seen each other since her wedding night, since he took her to bed and kissed her on her forehead. It’s the longest since he came back from studying in Pisa, and seeing him again makes her chest swell.

She closes the door to his room quietly. She then rests against it for a long time, arms behind her and a smile on her lips, watching him write while sitting on his desk by the window. When he finally notices her, he lets out a laugh and runs to her, and though her smile broadens, she stays where she is, hesitant, not knowing how to ask. He just presses her further against the door and kisses her temple.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming to Rome!” he says, carefree and happy, so obviously pleased to see her.

“I had not planned it,” she says as her hands come up to his shoulders. He grins, kisses her temple again, his eyes closed, looking devoted.

He raises her chin up to look at her better. “You look different. Older. Like–” he cuts himself off, frowning. “What is that?” he asks, pointing at her jaw, at the bruise that was the hardest to conceal. She swallows. She doesn’t know how to start, so she just goes straight to it.

“You promised me once, dear brother, that should my husband prove ungallant, you would take vengeance.”

He closes his eyes, absent-mindedly stroking the bruise with his thumb, as if to soothe her. He sighs and nods.

“What would you have me do?”

Lucrezia takes a deep breathe. “I am going to kill my husband. I need your help.”

 

\----

 

He doesn’t like it, says that it should be him, that she’s better than that, that he _wants_ her to be better than that, but she’s the one that wept all through the first night in her new home, the one that carries the bruises. She won’t let anyone else take the responsibility, or the pleasure.

 

\----

 

She stays in Rome for a week, long enough to hug her mother and play with Joffre, now so lonely in that big house of plots. Her father asks if she is happy, and she says that yes, the lands are beautiful and everyone is kind to her. Even if he weren’t Pope, it would feel wrong to lie, but she thinks she’s getting the idea of what kind of man her father is, and what kind of family they are, especially after her dear Djem died. She won’t let him take this away from her.

There are lovely moments, long walks with Cesare that end with them chasing each other and hiding behind trees, lively dinners and conversations with Giulia, but then she and Cesare go into empty rooms and he shows her five kinds of poison she could use, and the spell is broken.

“No poison,” she says, trying to sound like she is sure but unable to keep the fear completely from her voice.

Cesare sighs, but he hasn’t tried to change her mind in days. He then shows her daggers, how to wield them, how to handle their weight. It should be easy enough, what they’re planning, but he still teaches her how to move, what to do in case something goes wrong.

“I really wish you wouldn’t do this,” he says against her temple, eyes closed and arms around her middle as she chooses her weapon.

“I know,” she says. “But I must.”

Cesare comes back to Pesaro with her. Her husband doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t say much at all, actually, and dinner is an awkward affair. Cesare is significantly worse at hiding her hatred than she is, a skill she has only developed since her wedding. His hands shake from anger, and hers from nervousness and a dab of excitement.

Right before she enters her bedchamber, Cesare grasps her hand, brings it up to his lips to kiss it. “Are you sure?” At her nod, he says to be careful. She nods again, and after rising on tiptoe, kisses him lightly on the mouth, so very chaste. She whispers “I’m ready.” He closes his eyes, as if in pain, and walks away. She knows he won’t go far.

That night, when her husband enters the room, she expects him anxiously, her body tense and breaths, quick. If he notices, he doesn’t let it show. He goes about undressing as usual. “Your brother displeases me,” he says, the first thing he’s said to her all day.

“Indeed, my Lord?”

He looks at her sharply. She feigns innocence, lying on the bed with the covers up, eyes on the ceiling. “Do not mock me,” he says, and moves on top of her, violent and hateful as always, but not even truly angry, but bored, as he is every night. It’s only until she sits up and puts the dagger through his neck that he has the decency to look alarmed. He gasps, his fingers going to his throat as he tries to get the dagger out, but she won’t bulge, not now, and she only presses it in further when blood escapes from his mouth.

“I wouldn’t intend to mock you, my Lord,” she says, and it is now he that avoids her eyes, as his movements go sluggish and his breathing slows. The limp body falls on her, and she lets out a small shriek as she tries to remove his weight, blood soaking her nightgown, Cesare enters the room, alarmed at hearing her through the door, no doubt. When she takes the dagger out, it is slippery in her hands, but she’s not shaking any more.

And just like that, she is a widow.

 

\----

 

She kisses him, after, before she loses her courage, properly this time, with blood still on her hands. He kisses back, like she always knew he would, after the briefest of hesitations. It is not sweet, or tender, but it makes her blood rage. “Is this what you want, my sweet sister?” he asks against her lips, pressing his forehead against hers.

“Do you even have to ask?” she says, and he kisses her again, deeper this time. The entire room smells metallic, heavy with the myrrh she burned before as she prayed. She cards her fingers through his hair, and he lifts her up from the floor slightly to kiss her better, easier. It feels so right and so sinful at the same time.

“Let us burn in hell, then,” he says, dark and slightly menacing, and there is fear inside of her but also exhilaration.

“Let us,” she says, yet there is a body to dispose of, bed linens to burn, evidence to destroy. There will always be time, later.

The next day, the body of Giovanni Sforza is found in the woods, and his young bride is there to gasp in horror when they bring it into the house, stiff and bloody and dirty. She is thankful when her brother suggests that she should not witness such a sight, that she should retire and mourn in private. A bad hunting accident, they say. And if it seems strange, with his long hunting reputation, well, his entire staff sticks to the same story. Every single one of them.

 

\----

 

The ghosts come alive in the Sforza household. Lucrezia flowers too, flushed and breathless when she returns to Rome in her mourning clothes, looking fresh and golden against the black of her dresses. She smiles too much, perhaps, for what is acceptable in a widow, but she can’t seem to help it; the joy she feels as she lays on the soft grass of the house she grew up in, basking in the sun, when she reads to her mother as she embroiders, when she goes to bed at night and knows that no one will enter that she doesn’t choose to let in.

She and Cesare still chase each other around the house, around the whole of Rome, but now there are kisses in hidden alcoves, whispered secrets when no one is watching. He is everything, but he has always been everything to her, and it feels like it would have always ended like this, no matter the road.

“Let’s go swimming,” she says during summer, as the windows in her room let in the sweet nighttime air, because it is too hot to keep them shut. He is kissing her shoulder, sweaty and sleepy, on the verge of falling asleep.

“You are maddening, Lucrezia,” he says, looking up at her. “Can’t you see the time it is?”

She laughs, leans down to rub her nose to his. “And I still want to swim! Take me, Cesare.”

She knows she must look ghostly, running in the night with her nightgown flowing behind her, his hand in hers. The water is a cold shock, and he laughs at her gasp, splashing her. She splashes him as well, and they cling to one another, licking the water from each other’s mouths, floating lightly on the reflected moonlight.

Maybe, she thinks, maybe this is what her fairy tale, her happy ending, was always meant to be. Not dances and candlelight, but sneaking in the dark, and feeling lighter for it. And if it isn’t, she will do anything to make it so.


End file.
